I answer with a kiss. A real one, not like the short sharp shock I delivered in the taxi last night, but long, languid, and territorial, one hand anchoring his jaw and the other on the back of his head. His mouth is a silky cocoa-sweet drink, and the fierce kisses he returns swallow my breath. It’s dangerous, kissing him like this. He’s moving out of my life any day, but I’m going to overlook it, just this once.
Happy he’s staying put, at least for the next few minutes, I release him from his bathrobe.
Nothing but miles of smooth skin greet me, plus his neat, semi-hard cock, proportionate to the rest of him. Seeing me looking, he gives it a tug, stretching it up.
My heart isn’t supposed to lurch. Wanting him this way is like reaching out to touch the stove, already bracing for the burn. I watch him grow to full hardness, damp at the tip. And totally hairless.
“Doesn’t that get cold?”
“Yeah, sometimes.” Alaric huffs a laugh. “Are you offering to warm it up for me?”
“Yeah.” My hands are already at my fly. My mouth back on his. We need a horizontal surface. “Right now.”
“Us doing this is crazy. Half the time I think you hate me.”
“I do sometimes. You want me to stop?”
“Fuck no.” Alaric giggles around my kiss. “I want you to bring bad Mr Bossy out more often. I dig it like nothing else.”
I push him backwards. Alaric’s room is closer. It’s a landfill site, clothes and books strewn everywhere. For once, I don’t care because I’m going to have Alaric naked and under me. I give him a little shove. “On the bed. Now.”
I kiss him like I mean it, like I’m starved. A groan bubbles up through my chest; I feel it before I hear it, low and coarse, building since he recrossed his fucking legs. I kiss and suck a path down his neck, just to hear him gasp. I lick and bite at hisnipples to see his body jerk. I palm his swollen dick, delivering rough strokes of pleasure, until his pretty head drops back and his glossy mouth falls open.
The velvet skin of his cock is so warm it scalds my tongue. Messily, I swallow him down, not caring I’m out of practice, not caring I gag. He’s delicious everywhere; he tastes sweet as a fucking doughnut. I want him under me, over me, begging between my legs. I want him vertically, diagonally, on his knees, across my lap. I want to fuck him into the mattress until the bedframe snaps, I want to bend him over my coffee table halfway through book club. I want to ram into him against the shower wall, the bathroom sink, bent over the fucking toilet.
But most of all, I want him to want me with as much raw heat as I want him.
Zipping up afterwards and carelessly throwing Alaric a tissue—as if swallowing down his cum, then tossing myself off over his face is nothing but a quick fix—kills me. Every cell of my body screams to jump back into bed, smother him like a weighted blanket, and stay there all day and all night. The stupid thing is the horny bugger would probably be up for it. Even now, as I step away from the bed, Alaric’s fingers loiter over his pretty little cock. His blue eyes sweep over my body in a slow visual caress. But, yeah, how to ruin my hard-won, solid mental health in twenty-four short hours.
“We should… er… consider this something we did and won’t do again,” I manage, as if I don’t have knitting needles stabbing at my chest. “It’s not… as you know, how I do things.”
Alaric yawns. Abandoning his cock, he stretches out in the bed, unguarded, arms arching overhead, his spine curving like a bow. He remains naked as the day he was born, a sight I want to lap up all day. “No more sexing,” he agrees. “Consider this as a‘post two pints of real ale hangover’ reminder that it’s not what you want. Like a sexing version of hair of the dog.” Lean muscles ripple under his skin, he tosses the soggy tissue aside. “And now you’re going back to the celibacy thing until Mr Longterm comes along. Got it.”
“Exactly.” And then I crawl over him again and kiss him, one last time. For about ten minutes.
CHAPTER 19
ALARIC
Gerald travels to an optometry conference in Manchester for a couple of days. On his return, I have a horribly inconvenient set of night shifts. Perhaps it’s just as well. With the help of two pints of beer and a sultry soul number, I’ve totally screwed up the entire ethos upon which my landlord has meticulously calculated his future. Hopefully, he’s using the time and space to reset his mental road map back to saving himself for Mr Boring and Longterm. I’m spending it practicing not getting hard every time my mind replays him licking up my tears, then shoving my head back onto his cock.
To appease my internal chatterbox and divert myself from endless Gerald fantasies—him banging me in the shower, across the breakfast bar, bent over the kitchen sink with my face smooshed into his potted herbs (in every scenario I’m buck naked and he’s in his tartan jim-jams)—I sack off looking around a flat in north Fulham.
Instead, I invite myself over to Stefan’s. Thankfully, Marcus is out. Two bottles of cherry Coke and a bag of Zingy Vinegar Blast Doritos sit on the sofa between us as we battle maraudingbad guys on the PlayStation. We’ve wasted hours of our lives like this, sinceRed Dead Redemptionfirst came out, back when the sofa was at my folks’ house, Doritos were only sold in the big Co-op on Dagenham High Street and only in nacho cheese flavour, and the cherry Cokes were Asda own brand orangeade.
“You’re crazy. You should have checked that one out,” he scolds when I show him the flat spec on my phone. “It’s perfect. That’s a nice road, and you’d only have been one Tube stop away from here.”
“I know.” I zap a green blobby thing on the screen with my flame thrower. “It even had a mini balcony off the bedroom.” My bedroom at Gerald’s has a window scarcely big enough to get my head through, never mind a glass door opening onto a mini balcony. His flat boasts a tiny backyard, though, facing southwest. In the summer, Gerald says it catches the last bit of evening sun. He has a doll-sized patio table and two deckchairs stashed away in the bin lockup. He claims he eats dinner out there, if it’s warm enough.
“Sounds like a nice spot for a Sunday morning hangover,” Stefan observes. “We could still have a gander after this game, if you like. Text them now, tell them you were delayed at work with a sick patient or something.”
“Nah, can’t be arsed. There’ll be others.”
Moving out of Sutton Common is still number one on my job list, but feels like less of an imperative these days. It’s on my mind, but no longer consuming my every waking moment. Maybe I’m holding out for Marcus and Stefan to split up and Stef to invite me back. The way they’re going, there’s every possibility.
Perhaps I’m noticing the extra cash in my pocket or using the commute wisely. Normally, I’m useless at life admin, I tend to put it off and put it off until I’m scrabbling around at midnight, hunting for utility bills from 2022, or trapped in a never-ending labyrinth of forgotten passwords and verification codes, desperately ticking blurry reCAPTCHA images of motorbikes like my very next breath depends on it. But since moving to Sutton Common, forty-five minutes on the train with a flat white and an actual seat and table is proving my most productive slot of the day.
“Where’s Marcus tonight?”
